The Piss Poor Martyr, The Bus Stop Hound |
Issue 15
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Who gave you that bruise? The one around your eye, the color of bruised cabbage. The shape of it too. Does it hurt to blink, still? Did you give as good as you got? Who taught you how to cover your face, just high enough, like this? Dixon Shelby’s father Bill used to call it a “pop quiz” when he would teach his son how to put a guard up, a good one. He’d keep peppering Dixon’s chin with soft punches and no warning. Bill would only stop when he could tell his son was punching back harder than the last time. This is what Bill believed, as a father. The truth. He never lied to his son about anything. He tried to share every lesson he had ever learned. Even if Bill didn’t remember who with, or why, he made sure Dixon heard every story of every fight Bill had ever won. “A lifetime of a bloody education,” he said. And a two way deal. Even now at age thirty, Dixon still trades stories with his dad, like football practice, like a Sunday meal. Fight stories were a can’t miss tradition for them, for decades, a rope that tied together their lives.
Until three years ago, when Dixon called Bill from a gravel parking lot, to tell his dad one more fight story. Actually, Dixon’s only honest fight story. While picking rocks from his pants and tasting blood from rattled teeth, he confessed to so many different lies. Now, Dixon, living only a few minutes from home, coaching football again, teaching history, and sometimes still joining his dad in a deer blind remembers that morning through the quiet. The absolute silence on the other end of the phone as he admitted that this was his first fight ever, not just his first loss. Dixon had told his dad a dozen stories before: brawls in locker rooms, shoving matches at house parties. “Every single one…bullshit…” Dixon said. He had been lying to his dad for as good as forever. Now, whenever the two are walking through the woods, or sitting at a diner near dawn, Dixon can remember that morning through how empty it was, how much his dad was “just fucking listening.” Dixon didn’t know what more to say. Bill wasn’t normally the “listening” kind of guy. Hell, Bill once chased a referee to his car, screaming about a foul against nine-year-old Dixon in a football game. It was for dancing after a sack. Something Bill always told his son to do. He said, “If you aren’t gonna spend the whole paycheck, why even work to pay day?” The referee disagreed. Bill refused to accept that. He didn’t care that Dixon’s team had won anyway. He didn’t care that Dixon wasn’t crying anymore. Nobody went with Bill as the referee drove away and then he did too. Bill never told anybody what happened next. Neither did Dixon’s mom Sandra, or anybody else Bill might have told back then. The last thing Dixon remembers is how red his dad’s face was. How much Bill’s entire body was shaking. Like either Bill was going to explode, or everybody else would around him. Which is exactly what Dixon imagined, again, all those years later. Across the phone, he could hear how hard Bill was grinding his teeth, in order to not “drive across the state and beat your ass.” Dixon understood. This wasn’t just a lie. This was a long knotted noose of them stretching back their entire lives. A rotted foundation to everything they knew about each other. The one lie Dixon never planned on confessing to anyone. Until that bloody morning, when across the parking lot, after their fight, a little boy in football pads was trying to help the other guy walk away with dignity. Dixon watched them while he picked himself up off the ground, alone. It was like he had finally figured out something he never understood, watching that. Something he needed Bill to hear. As long as his dad would “just fucking listen.” Dixon had spent his entire life listening to his dad, even if he didn’t always understand what was being said. If he felt a few steps behind his dad. Behind what made Bill so confident, loud, entrenched in his beliefs. Dixon believed, if his dad had been a preacher, Bill would have been an old testament kind of guy—eye for an eye, hellfire and brimstone, never look back or get blessed into motherfucking salt. Dedication and anger side by side with no borderlines. A lifetime before he was a dad, Bill was raised the middle boy of seven brothers, in a small town somewhere south of St. Louis. Dixon has never been told where or taken to visit, but Bill always said it was the kind of place where if anybody you knew got into trouble, you always did too. That was how everybody survived, he said. If one of Bill’s brothers kissed the wrong girl and got jumped at the back of the school bus, Bill was climbing over the seats with his fists already bound. If Bill threw a rock in the wrong car window, their whole house would empty out until the neighborhood was quiet again. And if anybody saw Bill alone on the street and started charging him, he didn’t need to care why, he just needed to defend himself and whoever he was fighting for. Loyalty wasn’t the name of the game, but it was always how you kept playing. And if he didn’t fight back, Bill knew, he wouldn’t always have the luxury of raising his fists. He was going to have to “fight somebody, somewhere, by the end of any day,” so he might as well get it out of the way when he could. This is not the world Dixon was raised in, even if it was always right next door, waiting at the corner of his eyes, chasing him down over the years. The boogeyman in Dixon’s closet. Something that didn’t matter when he was with his dad because his dad never lost. But as soon as Dixon got dropped off at school or at his mom’s, it was like everything changed. Everything he believed in turned from iron to glass in his hands. He lost a grip on something necessary. And no matter what his mom, or teachers, coaches said, without his dad, that was always how he felt. Even as an adult coaching football, Dixon would ask himself what Bill would do, if he were here. Even if he was never going to agree. It was a handful of stars up in the night, to run by. But when those stars were gone half the time, Dixon was wandering in an absolute dark. Stumbling over himself. Alone. Dixon’s mom, Sandra never understood Bill, but she thought she knew her son enough, naturally. So for his sixth birthday, she bought him an old school composition notebook, black and white. Dixon’s parents had gotten divorced earlier that year and his mom started sitting down with him every night to write. Whenever she got home from teaching, she would make both of them dinner. Then before Dixon could do anything else, she would put the notebook down on the table. She never had the energy to tell one more kid what to write, but she always said he couldn’t get dessert or leave the kitchen until he wrote something down. Even before he could face all of his letters the same way, she just told him to cover every page. Easy enough. He took to the writing like a chore that first year, but by the time he was in the fourth grade, even when his mom forgot, Dixon couldn’t go to bed without picking up a pencil and a notebook. It became an instinct. The same as his breathing or the way he caught a football. So easy, he didn’t even think about what he wrote down. Dixon didn’t notice that he wrote down different things after days with his mom versus dad . He didn’t realize that even when he had heard the same stories, he was still memorizing them, because the details were always different. Details he could carry in his hand this way. Details he could always turn into something else, later on. In all fairness, Dixon did think to call his mom first, the morning of that fight. Before it was even over, he knew he would need help. He had never been fired before. Or, god forbid, gotten arrested. But he also knew she wouldn’t really be able to listen, right now. Would she hear his split lip over the phone? Would she call the cops herself?. Would she understand if he had to hang up because the fight wasn’t over? For better or for worse, all of the shit that had just hit Dixon’s fan was Bill’s shit. Dixon was a creature they both had built, but right now it was his dad’s hands at his side, his dad’s blood in his veins. It was long past time, he realized that he leaned back on those reflexes. That he started trying to remember why he wrote down any of those stories in the first place. The way his mom taught him to. Even if that wasn’t what Bill would have said. Dixon would always have to do both, somehow. That was his family. His only family. Yes, Bill had over a half dozen brothers, and more cousins than he ever sat down to count, but he never told his dad or brothers about Sandra and Dixon. As far as anyone else knew, Bill hadn’t talked to anyone back home since he left for the army. In Bill’s opinion to this day, family is only as important as what a person can do with their own two hands. What someone can build for their family. That was the point of every splinter of Bill’s life. What good are laws, hospitals, governments stacked so far above your head to bruise the clouds, when one lucky punch could come at any moment? What was standing there between your face the way it is now and afterwards? All questions of fairness and pride were immediately settled when Bill would pull the front two teeth dripping from his gums, and talk about the beatings he had seen a kid take, just because they weren’t looking when the first guy swung, or when the ball was hiked. Bill played football his entire life, until he went into the army. When he got back from Vietnam, he had a tattoo of a little football on his biceps, with the year he had graduated and won the state championship right in the middle. Dixon played even longer, through college, sometimes with Bill as a coach, and sometimes not. He only ever scored a touchdown though, once, in high school. He was playing offensive lineman and just happened to be in the right place at the right time to scoop a fumble and fall across the endzone. He was jogging back to the sidelines, listening to the crowd and still holding the ball when he caught Bill yelling from behind the bench. As soon as Dixon was close enough, Bill yanked his son’s wrists off the field and knocked the ball to the ground. He held his son’s hands like if he let go he would lose them. Even as Dixon got pulled back by his teammates, Bill kept holding, just as tight. He couldn’t look away from his teenager’s fingers, like he had carved every curve and every crack himself. Bill was always proud of his son, he said, no matter what. That was his job as Dixon’s father. “The work of my lifetime…” Bill said. But he also told Dixon, “...the work ain’t ever done…breaks are for the finished” After that first touchdown, the next morning they were still out in the woods before sunrise. Every other Saturday, they were out in the same trees, in the dark. Until Dixon was 18, this was the other half of life. Fighting and football were how you defended yourself in the middle of everyone. Hunting and hiking were for the middle of nowhere. Once you were hopeless, alone. Dixon was past the age at this point of being carried, but he still barely remembers anything before they got up in that tree. Then, as his luck held up, he bagged his first buck that morning.” This is your weekend, champ!” Bill cheered after Dixon caught it cleanly right behind the front legs after only an hour of his dad’s whispering filled up the dawn. Both of them were hooting and hollering before they could even get down on the ground but only Dixon got quiet as they walked towards the body. It was silly, stupid he knew, but Dixon had never seen anything dead before. Never even imagined it. Until he was “lucky.” Bill and Dixon had never talked about why they were out there. The first few years, Bill would just carry his son and a tinfoil breakfast sandwich out to the car, without words. Then in the years after that, it just became another habit. The way most of his weekends with his dad went b. Muscle memory. As long as Dixon did what his dad told him to and did it often enough, he could pass the time somewhere else in his head. That morning though, he knew he’d never forget the weight of that deer’s body. Or his dad’s words as Bill explained, standing over the dead thing, what Dixon was going to have to do with every deer bagged, from here on out. At least, as long as they were using Bill’s stand, his guns, and his ammo. Dixon would have to carry every kill either of them made back to the car, on his own and after he learned how to, he was going to have to field dress it, on his own, every time. It wasn’t just “a fair shake”, Bill said, it was also “the price of admission to the game.” A game, Dixon would never play alone, even if his dad didn’t always help. Dixon could never doubt his dad on that. If Bill was anything alongside loud, generous, and heavy-handed, he was there. Whether it was over meals, sports, or homework. When Bill got a call from his son in the middle of the night, he always answered, and Bill never hung up until Dixon was fast asleep on the other end of the line. Sometimes Bill’d still just sit there and listen to the quiet. Not a moment was still or wasted. Dixon learned how to stay clear of poison ivy on those walks. How to pump his arms with his legs before practice. How to memorize his multiplication tables with riddles and rhymes. Bill was constantly practicing his math while driving from jobsite to jobsite. At a certain age, Dixon might have tried to run from this trait of his dads, shake off that constant presence like a mosquito. But when he was young, he questioned his dad like the sunshine, like the breeze. He didn’t know how. Dixon could rely on Bill, always, like that. Always, that is, except for Sunday. That was another rule Dixon was raised on. Another thing he was never taught to question. Every Sunday was the only day that Bill could not be reached, could not be bothered. From the time that Dixon could wipe his own butt to once his time with his dad was always scheduled in advance. Why? Because Sundays were Bill’s cleaning days. His own unshakeable version of the holy day. As soon as the sun was up on Sunday morning, whatever tv Bill had access to would be in the center of his house waiting for the first kickoff, as he gathered all of the sprays, sponges, and buckets hidden away. The day then wouldn’t end until every surface had been scrubbed, every stone turned over, on his hands and knees for as long as it took. No matter who he had to ignore, scream with, or walk past, Sundays were a day just for Bill. They were also the only day’s Dixon ever actually saw his parents fight. And the only days Dixon’s dad ever yelled at him. When Dixon called his dad, that morning, it was Saturday. But Sunday would be the day his dad drove up to help him pack the little apartment a few blocks from the school. As well as the classroom Dixon would no longer be able to teach in. The job he knew he was going to lose, because of the parent he got into a fight with. Bill never mentioned that it was Sunday. Honestly, Dixon didn’t notice, until he was telling his mom the whole story later. Just as he spent that whole day telling his dad the story of the fight. His dad would ask for it again and again. Like it had happened years ago. And every time Dixon told it, his dad would have another question. Another detail he had missed or already forgotten. Another part that he didn’t understand. Dixon has told his dad his only fight story now easily a hundred times, in only the past three years, always trying to keep his details the same. Just trying to help his dad find whatever the two of them are looking for, together. Leading a horse to some water, so that both of them can drink. It was twenty years before the weekend of the fight, that Bill had chased the referee down the interstate, but not much had changed. Bill was never going to be the best listener. Dixon’s parents still don’t talk. But neither of them has remarried, either. Dixon has always tried to figure that out, too. There was one night in spring, when Dixon was in high school, and he was watching his mom struggle the worst he ever saw. She had just gotten laid off, after finding out that a cousin of hers had died in California. There was no way she could afford the plane ticket anymore, but she went anyway and called Dixon every night, asking if the lights were still on and the house was still standing. Dixon was sixteen and he said everything he could. Then when that wasn’t enough, he would just listen and write down what she was saying in his notebooks. The fears she had for them both, the regrets she normally wouldn’t show anyone, let alone her son. Then the third day that she was gone, Bill showed up at the house with his truck full of cleaning supplies. Dixon didn’t know how Bill knew. He didn’t know Bill still had a spare key. Bill didn’t explain anything. Dixon skipped school that Monday to clean his mother’s house, with his dad. They moved every piece of furniture out into the yard, scrubbed every ceiling and every wall. Dixon didn’t ask any questions or complain but he couldn’t move his arms much by the time the sun went down, when his dad then washed every piece of clothing in the house, washing by hand what he couldn’t get into each consecutive washer load. At the end of the day, like the past few days, Dixon’s mom called him and he didn’t think to lie or keep any secrets. He was surprised when his mom didn’t know Bill was there. She asked Dixon why he had let his dad inside the house without asking her first. She told Dixon to make his dad leave, right away, and Dixon told her that he would. She made him promise. Then Bill didn’t notice when Dixon stopped helping, even after he ordered a pizza for them and just sat in the kitchen, describing his dad’s work in his notebooks and quietly eating. Bill never asked for any more help. Dixon still thinks about that day, as he cleans every Sunday now in his own house. He remembers watching his dad like a machine that somebody forgot to turn off. That night, Dixon fell asleep to his dad still working, like distant thunder, and woke up to the front door locked and a text on his phone saying where to find the spare key. Bill said he would see Dixon at his next football game, in a handful of days. Dixon never understood his dad less than when he did stuff like that. When he dove headfirst into murky waters, guaranteed, to break his head open on a rock just as likely as he might save somebody’s life. Bill was a piss-poor martyr, Dixon thought, trying to somehow force a sacrifice, break a miracle with the weight of his body against life, like a hole in a wall. Meanwhile, Dixon would be sitting at the edge of the beach, praying nobody needed an ambulance and feeling just as much as his dad, watching the ripples and getting only his feet wet. Not to say that Dixon grew up a lonely boy. He was shy and a little awkward, but by the time his dad was married twice and raising his only kid, Dixon could name half a dozen adopted uncles from his dad’s work at construction sites or his nights at various dive bars, as well as their own kids and spouses. Most weekends that Bill had his son were colored with late night watch parties for any championship fight or bowl game, where Bill’s house would be filled no matter where he was living. His dad always had friends, Dixon could say. Which is also the only reason Dixon ever doubted his dad, back then. One night, the summer that Dixon turned thirteen, he was brought outside by Bill holding a pair of torn, stiff boxing gloves, and the announcement that Dixon was about to prove himself. There was going to be a fight. “Wait, the fight on TV?” Dixon asked. “In the living room,” Bill said, “Our own undercard match. Terry thinks just cuz his boy turned thirteen first, y’all are equals. If that little runts got a snowball’s chance in hell-” “I don’t…what do you mean? I don’t want to fight anybody.” “Remember what I’ve told you about the family jewels, forget that for one night and one night only. Terry Junior may be in the way, but his dad’s still a buddy. Keep it clean? This ain’t really fighting, just a little bit of fun, ya hear me?” Then, Bill went back inside, leaving Dixon alone with the gloves on, to practice, and to look across the front yard of his dad’s place, into the summer darkness like a luxury, like snowfall in the woods. Dixon couldn’t see much down the road, but he could remember where the neighborhood opened up. His mom didn’t live that far away, without any highways in the middle. Dixon would recognize which grocery store to go past, the restaurant to turn at, the water tower that sat at the back of her street. Without a buck of any size on his back, it would be easy, he thought. When Bill came back, Dixon didn’t ask how much money was on the line, if he could drink his first beer before the insanity, or if this was all really about to happen. Behind his dad’s back, he could see a kid that was practically his cousin already holding some gloves tightly to his own cheeks. Just the way Bill always said to. Just the way Dixon was taught. There wasn’t going to be a fight that night, Dixon knew right then. Not one that he was in, at least. Dixon wasn’t sure how he knew, but it was like he just decided it, that night. No matter what his dad said, or did, he thought about how easy it would be for Bill to go back inside alone and make up some lie. He tried to guess how much more he might have to run at the next practice his dad brought him to, or the next time they were out in the woods. But Dixon also knew, those things were going to happen anyway, the older he got. Whether it was one fight, or a hundred, Dixon realized his dad wouldn’t change. Bill was the dog that waited at the bus stop. The old barking thing that never moved for anybody else, no matter how much food, shelter, or noise they threw his way. In the rain, heat, or snow, he’d be found by the roadside, until the person he was waiting for came back to town. If they ever did at all. And that person wasn’t always Dixon, but on that night, there was nothing he could do that his dad wouldn’t sit through, wouldn’t watch, wait, and listen to. He could feel it. So he wasn’t going to fight. Less than an hour later, Dixon watched from the kitchen table, the same place he would get help with algebra homework come Monday night, as another boy wore his father’s gloves, and as Terry Junior swung wildly, smashed a punt sized hole in a living room window and upset somebody’s dog with his screaming. The chihuahua grabbed onto TJ’s leg and wouldn’t let go of the meat for anyone. By the time the window was covered in cardboard from somebody’s truck, the dog was calmed down, the leg was wrapped up and bandaged, and the dad’s decided what to do with the money that was bet, the main event match on tv was over already. Everybody had missed the actual fight. Dixon remembers that night, thinking he had it all figured out. Like the next time Bill was driving him to football practice, he could just as easily wrench the steering wheel from his dad’s hands, send the car into a ditch, change everything. Like he hadn’t already done that, every day of his life. Dixon loved football. He always would. He missed those long hikes in the trees, after he moved away for college. He loved his dad. More than he would have, maybe, if they weren’t together so much. Bill wouldn’t have been the same man. And of course, this isn’t how Bill would have talked about himself. Not to this day, what he would ever call any of it. Bill has never once used the phrase, “fight stories.” Dixon doesn’t really either. Even the most violent or repeated tales are just the memories Bill can’t help but share. He has football stories too, and work stories. Stories of Dixon as a baby that he’s told after just as many beers. Like the time Dixon pooped his diaper so much in Sandra’s arms, it went up the infant’s back and covered his own hair like a helmet. Dixon could have just as likely filled notebooks with any of those. He could have lost everything he had now, just like that. It was only a few months before his first fight that Dixon started coaching football. He stayed in the same city he went to college in. He never planned on moving back home. He didn’t plan on coaching either. When he graduated, after starting as a lineman for two years, he just wanted to teach. Honestly, he didn’t know what he wanted, but with a degree in education and knees that couldn’t even joke about trying for professional ball, he landed where he could. He taught seventh graders about the American revolution for a year, went and supported the students that played for the team, even talked to them about the plays they were learning. Then when one of their dads had to start working nights, one of the kids asked Dixon for his help. It was just the C-team, he told himself. It was just for a year. When he eventually called Bill to share the news, Dixon had to pull the phone away from his ear. He hadn’t heard Bill string together so many celebratory curse words since he was in high school. It gave Dixon an excuse to call his dad every Saturday again, too, after college gave him an excuse to pretend he didn’t care. He was honest with himself about that. After every game, once the field was cleaned off and the coach’s office locked up, Dixon would carry his duffel to his car and call his dad on his way to breakfast. He could imagine Bill sitting next to him, even if he never thought about why that mattered. Even if he never told Bill the reason for the calls. Sometimes they’d just go over the next holiday Dixon would be heading home. Sometimes they’d go over the day’s football game play by described play. Sometimes, Dixon would ask his dad for help. Especially in the beginning, when he found himself diving headfirst into so many kid’s lives. Differently than in the classroom, he felt. Coaching football felt like, “putting a handgun in twenty different puppies’ mouths, waiting for somebody’s tongue to find the trigger.” Bill laughed his ass off at that one. Told Dixon to, “trade those pistols for a box of hand grenades and get those dogs a championship!” Dixon faked a laugh whenever his dad gave advice like that. He tried to find what he was looking for in the words. He didn’t know what he was doing. He couldn’t stand it when a player of his got hurt. Especially when it happened outside of practice or a game. Dixon couldn’t help but see himself in the kids running before and after everything, with a dad in the bleachers chewing on a whistle he brought from home. That was the dad that broke a few of Dixon’s teeth, eventually. Another dad that Dixon had lied to. He had said the guy’s kid couldn’t start that morning. He had said the kid just wasn’t good enough anymore. Which couldn’t hold a drop of water. Everyone knew that boy was the best linebacker Dixon had. Even kids off the team called him Moose. Dixon didn’t care. He stopped caring when he saw the kid limping in the hallways one week. He knew he could have had a better lie, but it was too late. It didn’t matter anymore, when he heard the crunching footsteps behind him. When he turned to see the bearded semi-truck of a man already at his chest, grabbing Dixon by the shoulders, falling with him to the ground. Dixon was just squinting his eyes against the sunlight, when the first punch fell. Knuckles that threw his whole head towards the right. Sent his jaw farther it was meant to go. He could feel it.A dozen different things breaking at once, as every bone and muscle in his head reacted. Like a whole team moving when the ball gets thrown. Violence orchestrated. Nothing else attached. Everything was so far away. “Pa, I said stop!” Dixon tried to look up at the source of that voice, when another fist came straight at his lips. That’s when the blood started pouring. Not from his forehead, or his nose, like on TV with the guys in the cage. Dixon tasted it before he knew what it was. He felt pieces in his mouth with his tongue that he couldn’t make sense of. Angles that hadn’t existed before. A wall broken into bricks. Another fist came down, but this time Dixon got his guard up, got his own hands in the way, his forearms taking the brunt of the damage. Bruises left with every knuckle. A consolation prize. Muscle memory. So this is what it was like. The other side of so many of Bill’s stories. Dixon couldn’t remember how much his dad ever described the other guy. At a certain point, it would just be sadistic. Maybe the guy holding Dixon down was sadistic. The guy holding him down? Dixon didn’t realize he was laying on his own until his eyes adjusted a little bit more. Until he started breathing through the blood in his mouth. “What do you think I meant, by stay in the car?” That was the voice of the semi-truck. The man that Dixon could only describe from a distance or way too up close. He didn’t know the guy’s name. Nobody else said anything and Dixon forced himself to sit up. The guy was standing a dozen yards away, his back to Dixon. Breaking one of Bill’s rules. The guy was looking down at his son. The two were just staring at each other. Moose looked so much smaller standing next to his dad, instead of the rest of the football team. Dixon couldn’t remember the kids name either, as he climbed back to his feet. As he spat something out on the ground. Might have been a piece of a tooth, or just a glob of blood. When it landed, both of them looked over at Dixon, like he had caught them in something. Dixon was holding a rock. Like he wasn’t the one who put it there. Moose was holding onto his dad’s arm when the guy turned back to face Dixon. Moose didn’t let go. The guy turned as much as he could, to stare Dixon down. To notice the rock. “Dad?” Moose was pulling on the guy now. With all of his weight, trying to rip both of them out of this moment. Throw them anywhere else. It wasn’t working. “Go back to the car.” Dixon said then, or at least tried to. He could hear his own voice in his head, and also he could hear the grumble of shattered letters coming out of his mouth. “Don’t you fucking talk to my kid, don’t you talk to him ever!” Moose’s dad then turned his back to Dixon again, strike two, and got down on his knees, to look at Moose. He put a red-knuckled hand on his son’s shoulder and said some words Dixon couldn’t fully hear across the distance. They weren’t for Dixon. “...trust me, just go…call when it’s…ya hear me…” Dixon dropped the rock, as he stood there. He didn’t want to kill anyone. Even if that wasn’t how his dad would have done this. Bill wasn’t there. Bill wasn’t there, Dixon watched the guy hug his son and then let go. As he realized, the fight wasn’t over. Maybe it had barely even started. Even without Bill here, Dixon was still doing this. No matter how little he wanted to. Who was he trying to impress? Who could he blame? Would it always be like this? Dixon was running, before the other guy could turn around, before Moose could really get away from them. He was running before he knew why. This was a gift, wasn’t it? All of the instincts, and the knowledge. The goddamned muscle memory from lifetimes that weren’t his. Even if it was never wanted, was a gift always a gift? You weren’t supposed to ask for it, right? Moose hadn’t asked for this. As Dixon caught his dad off guard and tried to kick the “family jewels” clean in half. Dixon watched Moose fall too, jumping to his dad’s side. The toughest kid on the field, with real skills, an understanding. “You aren’t ever fighting, if you aren’t fighting dirty,” Bill would have said if he was there. But he wasn’t, as Dixon walked away from a kid on his hands and knees crying. The other guy was dry-heaving into the rocks as Dixon got to his car. As he turned away from them both. He wondered what Bill was up to, right now. He wondered what his dad would have to say. |
JACOB MICHALE WILLIAMS is a writer and self-described “midwestern boy”, originally from St. Louis, Missouri. He is also a graduate of the MFA program at Memphis University. He specializes in fiction, as well as poetry and screenplays. In these genres, Jacob cannot help but write about family, memory, generational trauma, and the language of the subconscious.
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